"Laux writes gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life in the West today."—Philip Levine In her powerful fourth collection, Dorianne Laux once again strikes fire from neighborhood moments: a quiet street at dusk, a pool hall, a bare tree. Focusing on the grace of working people, she captures the pain and beauty of women in all their variety, caught in the "lunar pull" of our time.
I Have A Poem The Size Of The Moon is a book of poems about Nebraska. Not cornfields, not cows: Cities, highways, long drives and the political conversations simmering. Between Meteors and Fireflies In a drought year, corn stubble bends into Headlines: "Farmers pray for rain." Tumbleweeds take time to harmonize and choreograph, somewhere between meteors and fireflies. The grocery sells blueberries all year round, but the charge card feels heavy as a refrigerator once you slip it from the wallet. You don't end up buying the magazines, just browse. It's a tow truck, doorbell button, garbage disposal broke summer: no real difference between a silo and a paper sack, it seems. And in the hallway, light glows from under the bathroom door.
In this ode to the moon, musical text weaves stories people have told for centuries with impressions we all might have had about this enigmatic but constant celestial orb. Enhanced by luminous illustrations, this magnificent picture book collection of original poems, retold myths, and facts about the moon glows with magic and mystery.
"Mixing fable and fact, extraordinary and ordinary, Jennifer S. Cheng's hybrid collection Moon: letters, maps, poems draws on various Chinese mythologies about women, particularly that of Chang'E (the Lady in the Moon), uncovering the shadow stories of our myths--with the belief that there is always an underbelly. Moon explores bewilderment and shelter, destruction and construction, unthreading as it rethreads, shedding as it collects."--Page [4] of cover.
Her seventh and most wide ranging collection. In the 1st of 2 sections, the poems move from the amusingly elegiac to the erotic, the classical to the funny. The 2nd section is a series of 15 poems for a calendar based on lunar rather than solar divisions
Woman of the Moon is a poetry book that speaks to the heart in the heart’s own language. Our minds often try to label earthly occurrences, but only our heart can make sense of them. That sense is not always the explanation we want to hear but that sense fills our guts with such emotion that its answer transforms the meaning of our existence. This book is filled with wild feminist prose proposing the liberation of the soul from the oppression imposed by a society driven by the ego mind. Pamela’s poetry spills love over the pages; it is a dance between stanzas that describe the need for a radical sense of self-love, a gut-adoration for life, and a deeper look at our collective relationship with the world. WOM celebrates life on this planet for the short period of time during which we are fortunate enough to be here. Our bodies might be from this Earth, but our souls are of the Moon.
A fresh translation of the classical Buddhist poetry of Saigyō, whose aesthetics of nature, love, and sorrow came to epitomize the Japanese poetic tradition. Saigyō, the Buddhist name of Fujiwara no Norikiyo (1118–1190), is one of Japan’s most famous and beloved poets. He was a recluse monk who spent much of his life wandering and seeking after the Buddhist way. Combining his love of poetry with his spiritual evolution, he produced beautiful, lyrical lines infused with a Buddhist perception of the world. Gazing at the Moon presents over one hundred of Saigyō’s tanka—traditional 31-syllable poems—newly rendered into English by renowned translator Meredith McKinney. This selection of poems conveys Saigyō’s story of Buddhist awakening, reclusion, seeking, enlightenment, and death, embodying the Japanese aesthetic ideal of mono no aware—to be moved by sorrow in witnessing the ephemeral world.
Have you ever sat next to a window on a rainy night, engrossed in conversation with a friend? A friend who keeps you entertained with his tales and rhymes. In this book, Daughter of the Moon, Prathamesh attempts to be that friend and titillate the dormant sense of romance and adventure in your life. With his play of words and love for storytelling, he tries to capture some of the most touching and rarest moments of life – breathing the air by the beach, dancing madly to your favorite tune, sharing tales with friends by the fire, embracing a lover after a long time. Daughter of the Moon is highs and lows of love, life, and romance distilled in pages.
Carol Ann Duffy's beautiful anthology features an eclectic mix of poems that chart human fascination with the moon across the centuries and around the world. Carol Ann Duffy on To the Moon: 'Editing Answering Back, in which living poets replied to poems from the past, I was astonished to see how many of the poems, old and new, referred to the moon. I then started to keep a record of such references, and from my notebook, I see that in one morning alone I came across no fewer than nine poems, from the likes of Coleridge, Graves, Rosetti and Rowe - and it was this selection that initially inspired To the Moon. There's something incredibly moving, and electrifying, to read a poem from the Chinese Book of Odes, written around 500 BC, and to feel both our distance from and our closeness to the past, and the Moon itself: I climbed the hill just as the new moon showed, I saw him coming on the southern road. My heart lays down its load. In collecting together poems such as these - poems that span continents and centuries - To the Moon shows what it is to be human; to love, to lose, to dream and to hope. The poems it contains give us a real and profound sense of our time on this planet, and the pleasures they offer are - like space itself - infinite.'
Tina Celona's darkly lucid, lightly comic poems are unusually explicit in their attentiveness to the primacy of poetry as a natural force, a force akin to that of the tides or their correlative lunar cycle. Describing in clear, unabstracted terms such elements of the quotidian as war, freedom, dream, "Satisfaction," and imagination, Celona invokes poems and their poet with the same degree of focused intensity as she does more obvious, more conventionally useful objects such as Singer sewing machines, shrimp, straw, driveways, corpses. The result is not so much an elevation as a leveling, a tableau of meaning in which the poet and her poems achieve a plastic, spatial, significant reality on the luxuriously detailed plateau of the natural world: "The cliffs of the / seabed the / Poem twisting like a / Tornado over the / Plains of the interior / Decoration".